y Don Quijones, freelance writer, translator in Barcelona, Spain. Raging Bull-Shit is his modest attempt to challenge the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media. This article is a Wolf Street exclusive.
There’s been a common misconception doing the rounds in Europe – namely that whatever is good for Brussels and Frankfurt must by extension be bad for the City of London, that small incorporated area of London known as the Square Mile that isuniquely powerful and at once unaccountable. The basic premise behind this flawed assumption is that with the creation of a single supervisory mechanism for all of Europe’s disparate banking sectors, including the UK – set to occur at the end of October – the City’s see-no-banker-evil, hear-no-banker-evil regulatory environment will lose much of its appeal.
However, as I reported previously (here and here), the stone-cold reality is that the EU’s new banking regulation is primarily aimed at increasing the concentration and consolidation of Europe’s financial sector, to the obvious and exclusive benefit of Europe’s biggest banks, including British banking behemoths such as HSBC and Barclays. In its ongoing negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the European Commission is doing everything it can to water down banking regulations on both sides of the Atlantic, in the process even outdoing its U. S. counterparts.
All of which will naturally benefit the City of London. After all, when it comes to the art of passing voluminous folios of toothless financial regulation riddled with gaping loopholes, no one – not even Washington – can hold a candle to the City’s servile watchdog, Westminster Palace.
This post was published at Wolf Street on September 21, 2014.
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